Music and the Internet conference

University of Chicago and virtual, 9-10 June 2023

Music and the Internet (musicandtheinternet.co) is a hybrid, multi-day interdisciplinary conference that will take place virtually and at the University of Chicago June 9-10 2023.

From autoplaying videos to social media echo chambers, the 21st-century internet is a noisy place. The internet and online platforms have become increasingly entwined in both the music industry and in everyday musical activity, with music as both a shaped and shaping medium. Online music communities have emerged around net-native genres with distinct aesthetic, communicative, and meme-based conventions. Such developments have varied throughout the history of music on the internet, with reverberating effects in other online creative industries. Accordingly, a range of theoretical, practical, and ethical issues are in open (and often urgent) discussion for those studying these phenomena.

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Teaching Popular Music Studies: Pedagogy and Curriculum

American Musicological Society Popular Music Study Group
Submission deadline: February 21, 2023
Conference Dates: November 9–12, 2023, Denver, CO
Keynote Speaker: TBD

Now, decades after the founding of popular music studies and the new musicology debates, (almost) no one questions popular music’s place in our curricula. But what exact part does popular music play in the curriculum?

At a moment where many departments are revising program requirements and course offerings with the aim to diversify and decolonize the curriculum, popular music offers its own solutions and challenges. For example: Popular music may already be an antidote to the elitism of Western classical music, but the ubiquitous “History of Rock” and “History of Jazz” classes also threaten to calcify into canonic lineages of great men. In our curricula, popular music classes (alongside world music) present the greatest diversity of musicians of color, queer artists, and working-class audiences, yet most popular music textbooks rarely go beyond the borders of the US and the UK.

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Music, Hope and Reimagining Society: the role of music in thinking around Utopia

BFE-RMA-SMI funded Study Day
Friday 16 June 2023, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Whether it be in response to the climate and ecological crisis, geopolitical instability, the pandemic, societal inequalities and injustices, attempts to reimagine society emerge as ever urgent, stirring respective currents in public discourses. There are a growing number of public-funded initiatives or grassroots collaborative movements that orientate their activities towards making room for re-imagining society, aspiring to realize people’s hopes for a better present and future. Two such projects within the UK are, for instance, the National Lottery Community Fund’s ‘Growing Great Ideas’ or ‘Civic Square’ in Birmingham’s ‘Department of Dreams.’

Focusing on musicking, studies have highlighted the decisive role that music can play in imagining utopias (see Levitas, 2010), in fostering social change by means of disrupting established ways of being (see Turino 2016), or in constituting alternative modes of (political) belonging (see Stokes 2018). However, there is much more to be explored regarding the modes in which musicking fosters reinvention. Scholars across diverse disciplines, practitioners, sound-artists and composers all engaging with music in so many different ways, need more insights into the explicit and tacit ways in which musicking contributes to envisioning utopias. Sharing each one’s specific knowledge based on their practice and discipline-scope will enable a broader understanding of the topic.

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Horizons of Punk: Punk-Rock Scholarship and its Methodologies

A Collaboration Between Gustave Eiffel University (Laboratoire LISAA) and Punk Scholars Network UK & South Korea
When: 9th June 2023
Where: Auditorium, Georges Perec Library, Gustave Eiffel University, Champs-sur-Marne, France

“The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point […] A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, ‘to have a horizon’ means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it.” (Gadamer, Truth and Method).

What are the horizons of punk-rock? What are the horizons of punk-rock scholarship? How are these horizons defined, and how do they operate in punk music, culture, and scholarship? As they evolve through time, history, and geography, what commonalities and contradictions emerge?

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The Journal of Beatles Studies

The Journal of Beatles Studies invites submissions for its second issue, to be published in Summer, 2023.

The Journal of Beatles Studies is an open-access, online journal publishing peer-reviewed articles drawn from leading interdisciplinary and international research on the subject of the Beatles encompassing criticism, historical and textual scholarship, legacy and influence.

The journal aims to bridge the gap between the study of the Beatles across disciplines such as musicology, cultural studies, history, sociology, music and creative industries, and fan studies, providing a focal point outlet for research undertaken to the very highest standards from around the world. Without privileging any particular critical approaches, methodologies, or theories, the journal welcomes all contributions that throw light upon the Beatles, their works, world, in their time and through to the present day.

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North American British Music Studies Online Symposium

Music and Ideas of the Popular: Reconsidering British Music and Musical Practices
August 10-12, 2023 on Zoom
https://nabmsa.org

The topic of the 2023 biennial online symposium is “Ideas of the Popular in British Music.” Despite the messiness involved in “popular” (or, for that matter, “art”) music, we propose a rethinking of “popular” and “popular culture” in British music, broadly construed, in local and global contexts.

We hope to address the following questions:  How are notions of the “popular” tied to assumptions about gender, race, national belonging, and social status? What values and ideologies are mobilized by the opposition of popular with elite culture? How has popular music been mediated, and how does its mediation shape the politics of space and place, empire and nation? What are the ways in which cultural producers, media makers, and fans have tried to break down the traditional elite / popular dichotomous models? How are all of these ideas discursively legitimated – and challenged (today and / or in the past)? What role has popular music played in British intellectual history, including but not limited to cultural studies thinkers, such as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, Simon Frith, Paul Gilroy, and Richard Dyer?

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Sonic Ties: Rethinking Communities and Collectives

University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna Reichenau/Rax, Austria and online, 26-30 August 2023

Keynote Lectures by
Srđan Atanasovski, Center for Comparative Conflict Studies (CFCCS), Belgrade Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, University of Alberta

Sumanth Gopinath, University of Minnesota
Ana Hofman, ZRC SAZU Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Ljubljana

Sound and social relations are tightly interwoven and oftentimes contingent upon each other. ‘Sonic Ties’ offers a lens through which to study the qualities of connection and intersubjectivity that arise through sound. isaScience 2023 invites you to explore ‘Sonic Ties’ as a central mode of sharing communality and experiencing collectivity through music, dance, and other phenomena of performance and cultural expression.

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Vivid Versions: Cover Songs, Contexts, and Subjectivities

Edited by Mike Alleyne and Lori Burns

The covering of an iconic song has long been a popular music strategy for an artist’s expression of identity and musical subjectivity. Such song adaptations often entail the traversing of borders that articulate significant contexts for social and musical identities. We summarize these potential contexts in the following list, in no particular order of critical importance:

1. place and space, history, and politics;
2. gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, age and ability;
3. authenticity, authority, and performative agency;
4. influence, intertextuality, and lineage;
5. genre, production, and sonic imprint.

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Probing the Borderland: Between Popular Music and Literature

Keywords: popular music, popular song, literature, song-writing, intertextuality, interartistry, aesthetic resonance, intermediality, hybridity, transformative space 

From the troubadour tradition to contemporary folk-blues and rock music, popular music and literature have long intermingled, notably because the popular song combines a musical line and a narrative songtext, hence Antoine Hennion’s formulation of the popular song as a “three minute novel” (Hennion 1983)

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EUPOP 2023: The Darkness Within

University of Stirling, Scotland, July 3rd – 5th, 2023.
Deadline: 17th March, 2023

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the tenth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at University of Stirling, Scotland, July 3rd – 5th, 2023.

With the overarching theme of The Darkness Within, EUPOP 2023 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. This includes, but is by no means limited to, the following topics: European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Costume and Performance, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Popular Literature and Graphic Novels, Queer Studies, Sport, Curation, Digital Culture, the idea of European identity and its relation to popular culture. A special emphasis, this year, will be on topics such as crime fiction, true crime, film and television.

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